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The Paradox of Nonviolence


Faisal Devji
Early in July of 1937, a well- known Nazi journalist, Schutz-
staffel (SS) ofcer, and adviser to Adolf Hitler named Roland von Strunk visited
Gandhi at his ashram in Segaon. As betted a National Socialist concerned with
the cultivation of a nations health and power, Captain Strunk was interested in the
Mahatmas criticism of machinery and modern medicine. In the course of their
conversation, Gandhi pointed out what he thought was the fundamental contra-
diction in the attention that Europeans paid to the preservation of life:
But the West attaches an exaggerated importance to prolonging mans
earthly existence. Until the mans last moment on earth you go on drug-
ging him even by injecting. That, I think, is inconsistent with the reckless-
ness with which they will shed their lives in war. Though I am opposed
to war, there is no doubt that war induces reckless courage. Well, without
ever having to engage in a war I want to learn from you the art of throwing
away my life for a noble cause. But I do not want that excessive desire of
living that Western medicine seems to encourage in man even at the cost
of tenderness for subhuman life.
1

Having expressed his horror of the hatreds sweeping Europe, the violence of
Spains civil war, in which he had participated on the side of Franco, and even
what he said was the overdone targeting of Jews in Germany, Strunk must have
been surprised to hear that Gandhi was in some ways even more contemptuous
of life than Hitler. For the Mahatmas desire to learn from the reckless courage
of European warfare was not in the least premised on the need to protect ones
own life or indeed the lives of ones countrymen, racial brothers, or partners in
Public Culture 23:2 doi 10.1215/08992363-1162021
Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press
D O X A A T L A R G E
1. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Interview to Capt. Strunk, Harijan, 3 July 1937, in The Col-
lected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book CD-ROM) (hereafter CWMG- EB) (New Delhi:
Publications Division, Government of India, 1999), 71:406.
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civilization, as was true of both the Nazis and their enemies. In fact, Gandhi was
clear that justifying war by taking life in order to save it could in no sense be
considered rational. What the Mahatma found disturbing, in other words, was
not that an inordinate concern with preserving life stood opposed to its casual
disposal in battle but rather that one led to the other in a way that makes the love
of life itself guilty of the desire for death. Only by giving up the thirst for life that
was represented in modern war and medicine alike, he suggested, could the urge
to kill be tamed.
From the kind of subhuman life that modern medicine sacriced in its vivi-
sections, to men and women rendered subhuman and thus available for fas-
cisms killing machines, Gandhi blamed humanity, or at least its denition in
terms of life as an absolute value, for the massive scale of modern violence. And
this allowed him not only to put the Nazis in the same category as their enemies
as far as the espousal of such a value was concerned but also to hold humanitar-
ians and pacists equally responsible for its violence. Indeed, in some ways those
dedicated to the cause of peace and humanity were even more culpable than the
rest, if only because they might value life in far greater measure than others did
who were at least willing to sacrice it in war. For in the very recklessness of this
sacrice the Mahatma saw the possibility of going beyond and even destroying
life as an absolute value. The kind of violence that entailed risking ones life, in
other words, was capable of providing an opening for nonviolence, something that
preventing war in the name of lifes sanctity never could. And this was why, from
those parts of European warfare that still involved such risk, Gandhi wanted to
learn the art of throwing ones life away. As if convinced by the Mahatmas words,
Strunk died in Germany a few months later, the casualty of an old- fashioned
duel fought with pistols, an event that resulted in Hitlers banning the custom
altogether.
It was only by refusing to treat life as an absolute value that Gandhi was able
to accomplish his aim and spiritualize politics, for he thought that as long as life
remained its basis, political action could never answer to moral principles. After
all, the desire to preserve life was something that all political actors shared and
therefore no moral principles could be drawn from it, these having been reduced
merely to second- order justications for valuing some lives over others. The cour-
age of a Nazi, for instance, would be deemed in this way to possess less value
than that displayed by an American or Russian soldier ghting him, since it was
dedicated to taking life for an immoral cause. However, the paradoxical thing
about the Mahatmas glorication of sacrice in the name of an ideal rather than
The Paradox of
Nonviolence
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a gross reality such as life is that its rejection of this reality as an absolute value
also entailed protecting it. Only by disdaining life could it be saved, while even
politics in its most sacricial forms, including the Cold War doctrine of mutually
assured destruction, continued to be devoted to its preservation.
Gandhi went further than asking people not to love life, if only because he
wanted them to love death more. Thus in his response to a letter from Bengal
describing the exodus of Hindus from what had in 1947 become East Pakistan, he
claimed that by loving death those in peril could avoid the cowardice that might
save their lives but leave them consumed by shame and the consequent hatred of
Muslims that was meant to atone for it:
Man does not live but to escape death. If he does so, he is advised not to
do so. He is advised to learn to love death as well as life, if not more so.
A hard saying, harder to act up to, one may say. Every worthy act is dif-
cult. Ascent is always difcult. Descent is easy and often slippery. Life
becomes liveable only to the extent that death is treated as a friend, never
as an enemy. To conquer lifes temptations, summon death to your aid. In
order to postpone death a coward surrenders honour, wife, daughter and
all. A courageous man prefers death to the surrender of self- respect.
2

A life devoted solely to self- preservation, in other words, would not be one worth
living. Though he was willing to tolerate spectacles of sacricial destruction,
Gandhi did not pay as much attention to such events in places like Stalingrad,
Dresden, or Hiroshima as did the politicians did who waged war in the name of
life. Instead, his disregard for life in the name of principles took far more quoti-
dian forms. So during the time he spent in Noakhali just before the partition of
British India, trying to make possible the return of Hindu refugees, the Mahatma
repeatedly forbade private persons and charitable organizations to render them
help. In doing so he meant to compel the Muslim League government of Bengal
to fulll its responsibilities in caring for this displaced and terrorized population,
while at the same time teaching the latter to behave as the citizens of a democ-
racy yet to be born. Nirmal Kumar Bose, in his luminous account of Gandhis
days in Calcutta and Noakhali during this period, makes it abundantly clear that
the Mahatmas concerns were in fact not humanitarian at all but political, since
it was in politics that the root of violence, as well as its potential for conversion,
was lodged:
2. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Death Courageous or Cowardly, Harijan, 30 November
1947, in CWMG- EB, 97:373.
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But, in spite of the magnitude of material damage, Gandhiji was more
concerned about the political implications of the riots. Later on, he told
me one day that he knew, in any war brutalities were bound to take place:
war was a brutal thing. He was therefore not so much concerned about the
actual casualties or the extent of material damage, but in discovering the
political intentions working behind the move and the way of combating
them successfully. . . .
The conversation with some friends who had come on behalf of the
Gita Press of Gorakhpur had more than a usual interest. They came with
an offer of blankets worth a lac of rupees for distribution among the
evacuees. But Gandhiji wished them to hold back the gift for the present.
He said, it was the duty of the Government to provide warm covering, and
it was within the rights of the evacuees to press their demand. If the Gov-
ernment failed, and confessed that it had not resources enough, then only
could private organizations step in to help the evacuees. Unless the people
were conscious of their political rights and knew how to act in a crisis,
democracy can never be built up. . . .

. . . Gandhiji dealt with the problem as a whole and explained that we
should proceed in such a manner that the Government might be put in the
wrong and the struggle lifted to the necessary political plane. Whatever
steps had to be taken, whether it was relief or migration, should be taken
only after the Government had been made to confess that they were unable
to do anything more for the sufferers, or had failed to restrain the rowdy
Muslim elements. If, in the meantime, which he hoped would not be more
than a week or so, a few of the sufferers died of exposure, he was hard-
hearted enough (main nirday hun) not to be deected from his course
by such events. The whole struggle had to be lifted to the political plane;
mere humanitarian relief was not enough, for it would fail to touch the
root of the problem.
3
My purpose in quoting Boses text so extensively is not only to show that Gandhis
politics of nonviolence was as far removed as it could possibly be from humani-
tarianism and its cult of victims but also to demonstrate how it was that his ide-
alism was the least idealistic of theories. So his response to suffering was not
in the rst instance to ameliorate it but instead to make sure that those who had
been wronged behaved like moral agents and not victims, thus allowing them to
enter into a political relationship with their persecutors. These people, after all,
were themselves in need of a moral transformation, for which their victims were
3. Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1999), 43, 66,
87 88.
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to be made responsible, preferably without the intervention of any third party.
If the spiritualization of politics meant anything, it was this eminently realistic
dedication to an ideal that took precedence over lifes own reality. And in fact the
nihilistic or even apocalyptic elements in modern politics all seem to derive from
the fears of those who value life either in its weightiest forms, as represented by
the survival of nations, races, and even species, or in its lightest and most impov-
erished ones, such as the desire to safeguard ones prot, lifestyle, or well- being,
both forms part of the same continuum. For it is the fear of this value being threat-
ened that makes possible a defensive politics with no limits as far as its violence
is concerned.
When in 1947 he was asked to express his opinion on what might go into a
report for the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, which was
to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Gandhi rejected the whole
idea of inalienable rights. Chief among these, of course, was the right to life,
which like all other rights the Mahatma would make dependent on duties instead,
since these had nothing passive about them and involved dealing with violence in
an effort to convert it. Indeed, it was precisely in violence that Gandhi claimed to
discover the possibility of its overcoming, something that the great revolutionary
gures of the past two centuries had always maintained, though none in Gandhis
intensely moral if also idiosyncratic way. It was the moral relationship between
enemies as much as between friends that created rights, which meant that such
relationships had to be emphasized and not what the Mahatma considered the
deeply suspect ideal of life as an absolute value. It might be appropriate, then, to
conclude this essay with a passage from Gandhis letter to Julian Huxley, the rst
director of the United Nations Educational, Scientic, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), condemning the rights of man:
I learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved
and preserved came from duty well done. Thus the very right to live
accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From
this one fundamental statement, perhaps it is easy enough to dene the
duties of man and woman and correlate every right to some corresponding
duty to be rst performed. Every other right can be shown to be usurpa-
tion hardly worth ghting for. I wonder if it is too late to revise the idea of
dening the rights of man apart from his duty.
4

4. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Letter to Julian Huxley, May 25, 1947, in CWMG- EB,
95:137.
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If Gandhis vision of nonviolence is to be taken at all seriously today, we ought
to acknowledge that one of the great challenges facing its proponents is to think
about what a citizenship of the world might look like that does not invoke the
rights of man as its justication. Nothing, surely, could be more revolutionary
than such a task, which remains to be accomplished in a time marked by the end
of revolutions.

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